WASHINGTON  Immediately after the terror attacks
on Sept. 11, the CIA began looking for a "smoking gun," a document that would
indicate the intelligence agency knew something it could have acted on to thwart
the terror attack. Today, as a congressional inquiry begins into how U.S. intelligence
failed to crack the al-Qaeda plot to attack America, the results of the CIA's
search through 350,000 pages of documents comprise a computer-generated timeline
that is 327 feet long when printed out.

The timeline, intelligence
officials say, dates to the early 1990s. It tracks what the Central Intelligence
Agency knew about Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network by drawing
from the work of undercover agents overseas, spy satellites and eavesdropping
equipment, dispatches from foreign intelligence and testimony of al-Qaeda members
arrested in past terrorism investigations.

But nowhere among the thousands of pages turned over to
a House and Senate investigation is a document that proves the CIA could have
broken the plot to fly jetliners into buildings, agency officials and some lawmakers
say.

"I have seen absolutely nothing that would have allowed
me to say, 'Nobody get on an airplane tomorrow,' " says House Intelligence Chairman
Porter Goss, R-Fla., who has access to the most highly classified documents
laying out what the CIA and other intelligence agencies knew before Sept. 11.

One senior CIA official, speaking on condition of anonymity,
says the agency hasn't found a "smoking gun," and the official doesn't think
congressional investigators will find one either.

Missed opportunities

That contention is drawing increasing skepticism on Capitol
Hill and elsewhere as each new disclosure about the snippets of information
U.S. intelligence collected on al-Qaeda raises the specter of missed opportunities.

"We certainly made some mistakes, or we failed to act,
based on certain information that was available in one office or another," former
president Gerald Ford said Monday during an appearance in Washington. "If it's
found that there was a serious mistake ... whoever was responsible ought to
resign or be fired."

Among the items on the CIA timeline is CIA tracking information
on Nawaq Alhamzi and Khalid Al-Midhar, two suspected al-Qaeda members who later
became Sept. 11 hijackers. They attended an al-Qaeda planning meeting in Malaysia
in January 2000.

Though the CIA knew these men could enter the USA legally,
it failed to share the information with the FBI until a month before the attacks.

Some leading figures in the House-Senate investigation
have seized on this as a major CIA blunder, among them, Sen. Richard Shelby,
R-Ala., a frequent critic of CIA Director George Tenet.

"There have been massive failures of intelligence at the
CIA," Shelby said Monday on ABC's Good Morning America. "I know the director
over there is in denial, but I believe he's totally wrong, and the facts will
be brought out to prove that."

In what is growing into a CIA vs. FBI blame game, intelligence
officials counter that the FBI had access to the intelligence on the Malaysia
meeting at the time it occurred.

CIA documents show that a copy of Al-Midhar's passport
was shared with the FBI before the Malaysia meeting. Because the passport was
stamped with a multiple-entry visa for the USA, these officials say, the FBI
should have known 20 months before Sept. 11 that Al-Midhar was an al-Qaeda operative
who could be in the USA. An FBI spokesman declined to comment, citing the congressional
review.

Lawmakers also have information indicating the CIA had
access to the National Security Agency's electronic intercepts of al-Qaeda operatives
conversing about impending attacks, and even had managed to plant clandestine
agents inside the terrorist organization  all without cracking the Sept.
11 plot.

Tenet was in the Mideast on Monday trying to reorganize
Palestinian security forces. The CIA is declining to comment on the new disclosures
and the criticism of the performance of the agency and its director.

A deeper problem?

Although many critics have raised a cry over what they
see as the failure by law enforcement and intelligence to "connect the dots"
based on scores of disparate clues, a few say the real problem runs deeper,
to a lack of information about an enemy the United States had been watching
closely for more than six years.

"If you're telling me that CIA and NSA were completely
clueless, that even with the benefit of hindsight, they were clueless, that
would be the scandal," says John Pike, a national security expert with GlobalSecurity.org,
a think tank in Washington.

Up to now, the FBI has been feeling most of the heat.

The Sept. 11 hijackers set up cells inside the USA, the
FBI's jurisdiction and a place where the CIA is forbidden by law from gathering
intelligence. Clues and hunches developed by field agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis
in the weeks before the attacks pointed to the possible use of hijacked aircraft
by al-Qaeda operatives attending U.S. flight-training schools. Yet the warnings
raised by these agents were ignored by headquarters.

FBI Director Robert Mueller has been beating back calls
in recent days for his resignation by unveiling a massive reorganization of
a bureau he admits failed to follow leads.

The bureau, proud and highly turf-conscious, has had to
endure the humiliation of asking the CIA to help with its counterterrorism efforts
and its long-overdue computer modernization program.

As an illustration of the bad feelings between the two
agencies, the practice of CIA and FBI analysts working at the other agency is
referred to as a "hostage exchange program."

The CIA, which has made no similar admission of failure,
will come under close scrutiny in the hearings, especially as details of what
the agency knew come to light.

"Once these hearings get going and people start looking
at what the nature of the failure was, the number of people and organizations
in those cross hairs is going to increase," former deputy attorney general Eric
Holder predicts.

Some in law enforcement and intelligence circles find it
difficult to explain why Mueller, who took over as FBI director one week before
the attacks, seemed to be getting all the criticism while Tenet, who has been
running the CIA since 1997, has avoided it.

As one Justice Department official puts it, Tenet is Teflon
and Mueller is Velcro.

No headhunting

Tenet might have other advantages as the hearings unfold.
House Chairman Goss is a former CIA clandestine operative and an unapologetic
booster of the CIA. Goss stresses that his loyalty is to the country, not the
agency. But he made clear in an interview that his aim was not to turn the hearings
into a headhunting expedition.

"We're interested in being absolutely candid in pointing
out where the problems are, without fixing blame," Goss said. "The first thing
is the remedy, then you go back and assign causes."

The CIA may have an institutional advantage over the FBI
in the congressional inquiry.

The House and Senate Intelligence committees not only oversee
the CIA, they also share access to much of the highly classified intelligence
the agency generates.

Lawmakers serving on the intelligence panels may be reluctant
to blast the CIA for failing to heed warnings when the same might be said of
the committees themselves. And they might find it easier to assign blame to
the FBI, which reports to the House and Senate Judiciary committees.

The congressional investigation might be weakened by a
shortage of staffers with the appropriate clearances to deal with the flood
of documents being submitted by intelligence and law enforcement.

Many of the committee staffers are former employees of
the CIA, FBI and other agencies that will come under congressional scrutiny.
Those past relationships raise questions about how tough the investigation will
be.

Although Mueller is not regarded as having Tenet's political
acumen, he anticipated the intense focus on the FBI. By admitting error, grappling
in public with embarrassing memos and leaks and then proposing a sweeping solution,
he might have put the worst behind him, his defenders say.